SOUNDTRACK: MOON HOOCH-“Number 9” (2011).
I don’t love the saxophone in rock music. In fact, I often find the saxophone to be the single source of cheese in a lot of good music. And yet when a saxophone is done right–Colin Stetson, John Zorn, Morphine, it can be an awesome instrument.
What about two saxophones? And only a drummer with them? Well, that’s Moon Hooch. They play a bass saxophone and a squawking tenor (I guess) saxophone. And, more like Morphine of the above bands they play fairly heavy riff rock songs like “Number 9.” But these songs also make you move–dance, tap your foot, whatever it is. After just a few notes, you’ll be hooked.
There’s not too much more to say about this song. With the opening sounds of a subway platform, this song really sounds like a couple of guys busking o the platform, but man, it’s much more than that. There’s some excellent drum work keeping this song grounded, but the stars are the two saxophones played off of each other. There’s no words, just horns. Get moving!
[READ: March 15, 2014] Ballad
This is a beautiful and fascinating book. It is a children’s book but it demands some close reading. And yet there aren’t all that many words in the book. It is the design of the book that is the “selling point.”
The story is a fairly simple one (although I admit I found it a little confusing). There is a preface which explains that the story is about a child who goes home the same way every day. And yet suddenly his whole world balloons around him. [And yet there is no child in the book]. Chapter 1 begins with a paragraph explanation that the school clock has stopped and no one seems to care.
After that first page, each subsequent page has a (nearly) full page image and one or two words underneath it (the script is also charming). And so we see the school, the street, the forest, home. Each new chapter works in the same fashion—a small paragraph explaining the setup and then several pages of pictures—each picture (the school, the forest) is exactly the same (they look silk screened) with the same caption underneath (although in subsequent chapters they are modified somewhat). Chapter 3 introduces us to a stranger and, even more unsettling, bandits and a witch.
The witch casts a spell which turns the house upside down. So the house is the same house except now the picture (and the text) are upside down. It is so simple and yet quite disconcerting. Soon everything is upside down which allows the bandits to take advantage of the situation to rob a rain.
So things are a little weird—there’s a witch, there’s bandits, there’s also soldiers and now there’s an elf as well. By chapter 5 there is a queen (who is kidnapped), a draft for the military, a dragon, a sorcerer and a host of demons.
What I liked about Chapter 7 was that it was nighttime, so most of the words were left out (because it was too dark to see what you were encountering—very clever, especially when the dawn comes and you can kind of see the words). This chapter sees the stranger go on a lengthy and dangerous journey.
The cool style also makes it very hard to determine exactly what is happening. Following the words certainly tells you what happened, it’s just that with no verbs, the action is rather vague. And I’m not really certain what happened to a lot of the characters.
The story feels very European, and indeed it was originally a French story called Romance. It was translated by Claudia Z. Bedrick and I have to assume it was translated well, even if I found it a little hard to follow.
I liked this book more in conception than execution, although the art was really quite fun to look at. For a nice selection of pages from the book, check out this page from Brainpickings.
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